Episode 325 – Todd Schroth, Schroth Team Brokered By eXp Realty

  What are you doing right now to help you succeed in the long run? Join your host Bill Risser as he talks with Todd Schroth about elevating real estate standards. Todd has spent the last 20 years vested in the Orlando Real Estate market by helping others buy, sell, and invest while standing alongside investing himself. He shares his journey in this industry and dives deep into why coaching is crucial for business success. He loves educating people and helping them reach their full potential, even if it means that person can search for other job opportunities outside of his company. He also discusses creating solid teams, recognizing strengths, and nurturing opportunities. Learn how to build a better business! --- Todd Schroth, Schroth Team Brokered By eXp Realty This is episode 325. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, thank you for telling a friend. We are going over to Orlando. That's where Todd Schroth and his team with eXp. He has been in the business his entire life. As soon as he got out of high school, he was right into real estate. His family has got a history of it. I love these stories. They are quite different. A big shout out to Anthony for telling me that this is the guy I needed to talk to. He was absolutely right. Thanks, Anthony. Let's get this thing started. Todd, welcome to the show. Bill, thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to sharing. You have a huge fan in Tampa. Did you know that? That's why I'm excited to be here because he's talking nothing but crazy stuff about this guy, Bill Risser and I was like, “Who is this guy?” We had a nice conversation. I can't wait to get your story here. We will get this thing going. You are in Orlando doing great things in the real estate world. You have been there a long time. Are you a native Floridian or did you escape the cold somehow? The family wanted to get down and escape the cold. My mom, back in high school, was like, “Want to move to Florida?” I was like, “Sure.” I was sixteen years old. We drove down. We have been down here ever since. You moved in the middle of high school. How was that? It’s my junior year of high school. I went to a private school here, which was funny because sitting in the hall, on the first day of class, somebody walks up to me and was like, “Todd?” He was somebody I went to sixth grade with that moved down here as well. It was perfect. You had someone right away and that was cool. Looking at your history. It's pretty interesting that you are one of the unicorns on the podcast. That's a good thing. You've only worked in real estate. From day one out of school, this is what you've done. Talk about the very beginning. I graduated high school and got signed up for college. I had one job besides real estate and was eighteen years old. Going back to the days of fax machines, I was in the bookstore doing something and saw a piece of paper on the school's fax and it said, “Computer sales.” Let me go check it out. It was an ad they sent over. I went and checked it out. I got the job and did that for a year. Basically, I was 17, 18 years old doing that. A buddy of mine from high school ran into me at the computer store and he's like, “We are buying real estate and doing this stuff.” I was like, “It sounds interesting. Let's talk further about it.”   [bctt tweet="If you want to be a great leader, bring your team where they can be successful as well. They could be successful agents on their own. " username="billrisser"]   At nineteen years old, I get involved in the real estate industry and I'm a second-generation real estate. My mom has been selling for 55 years. My dad, my stepdad, and my step-mom, all had real estate licenses. My sisters both had real estate licenses. My brother is a custom builder. My wife got her license. It is the family business. Our dinner conversations at Thanksgiving were about what was going on with the markets. At nineteen years old, I bought my first investment property. I didn't have my real estate license but I was doing the investment stuff. I was like, “Let's give it a shot.” We had private capital tobacco. It obviously made it easier to buy without having to save up back then $16,000 to buy our first house. Back then, it was $16,000 at 18% was our loan. I was buying a lot of real estate with 18% money and cashflowing all of it. Now, you buy something with 6% and I'm like, “Can you cashflow it?” The price is all relative to the rate that's sitting out there. I did the investment stuff for about 5 to 25 years. I got burnt out. I had a lot of rental properties, stuff we were managing, and flips we were doing. At the same time, I opened up a telemarketing company. I ran that for about 3 or 4 years and had a manager in place. I wasn't like physically involved every day. When I quit real estate investments and got into the management of the hands-on, I hated it. I hated working with people. I did it for about six months and said, “I'm done. I'm going back into real estate.” I shut the company down. We sold it to our manager. We got into the real estate side. I got my license and right into sales. How do you find your first client? Go after the market you were working on before. I was listing investment properties. The staff was doing, “We will buy your house cash,” ads. If they didn't buy it, I would go in there as a listing and say, “They didn't want to give you enough money. That was my first listing appointment was someone who didn't buy their house. You had a solid ten years after that first purchase at nineteen. Your experience starts building on investment stuff until the time you become a residential real estate agent. For five years we did investments. For the last several years have been involved in real estate. You are 25, 26 years old talking to probably people a bit older than you about investing in real estate. How did that go? When you flip or fix, or work on 800 properties more or less, you have a lot of knowledge that you are spitting out at them. Growing up in the industry, I had knowledge of the whole process because we have been on the floats, in the offices, and all kinds of things with our parents. We were basically going through that with them. I do feel bad for the kids that are getting their licenses now at 19, 20, and 21. I love working with those people because I want to give them the knowledge that I had to help them get started. When you started running your own operation, would you hire young guys or women that had something about them that you knew that they were going to be successful? How did that work? We had an agent walk into my office about new agents and I was like, “The beauty of new agents is I can't teach an old dog new tricks.” If I had an agent coming to me who want to work on our team, who has been in the business 10, 15 years, I can't get all their bad habits out of them but I can take a brand-new agent and train them and give them the exact path to go forward with. When I go into coaching and I'm like, “I want to revamp my stuff.”   [caption id="attachment_4357" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Coaching: We can't get all their bad habits out of them, but we can take a brand new agent, train them, and give them the exact path to go forward.[/caption]   What do I do? I always go back to my old habits and do things the way they were, even though the other system is better. Even though I can show that agent who has been doing this for twenty years who doesn't have the success level they should, the path to go forward. That's the correct way to do it. They still go back to the old habits. If I can take you, Bill, as a brand-new agent and get it going, you are going to have the right path going forward. I love new and young agents because they are right out of school and aggressive. They want to make money. Hungry is a good word. You started with RE/MAX and were with RE/MAX for a long time. I went right for the best office. I knew I wanted to end up there. I was at another office for two weeks and the day I was supposed to be my floor time, I quit. If I'm going to give up a lot of my commission, I might as well go right to RE/MAX where I'm going to make 100% or 95% of the time. All I wanted to go to that office for was sales training. I already knew real estate but I needed sales skills. That's why I was going to the first office. When I was looking at the numbers, I've always played with the numbers. How can I make more money? I went right to RE/MAX and signed up with them. I was there for eighteen years. Obviously, we ended up at eXp Realty a few years ago. When you start thinking about margins at age nineteen, that changes your whole life. If you think about it, I looked at the sheet when I was signing up. I'm like, “First $30,000. I give them $15,000,” but it costs me $1,000 a month to work at RE/MAX so twelve times $1,000 is $12,000. I'm ahead. $3,000 there. Why don't I go right to the source? Think about this, in 2000, things are starting to explode when it comes to social, everything online, the Web 2.0, we are talking back and forth. I'm going to get a wild guess here. You probably embraced that as a young guy and ran with online leads and all that great stuff....